cover image The Chateau of Resenlieu

The Chateau of Resenlieu

Gerald Hugh Berners, Lord Berners, Lord Gerald Hugh Tyrwitt-Wilson Berners. Turtle Point Press, $13.95 (96pp) ISBN 978-1-885586-15-5

Lord Berners's stories and memoirs have recently enjoyed a revival, to which this slim volume of reminiscences forms a pleasant addendum. Like Saki, Berners takes his themes from the revolt against the solemn pieties of the late Victorian drawing room. In 1899, when the memoir begins, Berners, born Gerald Tyrwhitt, is 16 years old. Just graduated from Eton, he happily agrees to be sent to polish his French at a school in Normandy, the Ch teau de R senlieu. Accompanied there by his mother, who fears that her son might be fatally tempted by Catholicism, he arrives at the ch teau a month before the influx of other students. Berners has brought his paints and sketchbook with him, and in a sense, this memoir is another sketchbook. The prose drawings include Madame O'Kerrins, the proprietor of the house; Berners compares her attitude toward human beings with that of an entomologist toward insects--she is curious about their behavior, without necessarily being sympathetic. For example, O'Kerrins is perfectly conscious of the malice Madame Bonnet, a widow and frequent visitor, veils beneath her protestations of Christian compassion. Bonnet also has the unusual habit of advertising for dead cats, which she uses to fertilize her begonias. O'Kerrins's nephew, Gerard, patronizes Berners because Berners is a virgin--Gerard, on the other hand, is carrying on with the village doctor's wife, a very dumpy version of Emma Bovary. The other boys eventually come, and Berners, at the end of the book, returns to England with more confidence in the peculiarity of his sensibility. As he puts it: ""I had often heard foreigners, and particularly the French, criticized for not being sporting, for frivolity and laxity of morals, all of which deficiencies at that time appealed to me."" (Oct.)